June 9, 2004
death of a brand consultant
Another Brand Consultant bites the dust! Jennifer Rice writes:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic, but more in context with what I can offer my clients.Here’s a heads-up for my blog friends… I’m renaming my company and repositioning myself out of the branding game. Stay tuned; I’ll hopefully have a new web site & corporate ID in a couple weeks to share with you.
I decided it’s time to follow my own advice! As many of you know, I’ve been struggling with the word ‘brand’ for a long time; there’s too much confusion about what it means, and ‘branding’ is too crowded of a market. But more fundamentally, most execs don’t think they have a branding problem. The issue they usually face is being too close to their own businesses… getting mired in operations and ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ They’d all like to be creative about where to take their businesses, but as Rob points out, that can be a real challenge.
In the comment section I pipe in:
Just as well.… “Brand” as a term is kinda tired. People are sick of hearing it, sick of saying it etc.So now we’re all scrambling around to find the new magic word. No, it isn’t “Love Marks”. Heh.
What companies find interesting is not what they make; not their brands. The hot new thang is the “purpose-belief”… the glue that keeps the Fellowship “fellow’d and ship’d”, as it were.
i.e. honing in on the collective sense of purpose.… through common purpose comes common identity.
That being said, “Fellowship” applies far more easily to a company like Apple or Dell than say, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.
My advice would be, if you’re trying to sell them “purpose”, to stear clear of clients who have little sense of purpose themselves.
A marketeer cannot give a company a sense of purpose– she can only better reveal what is already there.
